Filippo Sciascia, Xuanlong, 2020

Informing much of Sciascia’s work is an interest in the hoary origins of civilization’s contemporary technological and cultural systems. Here, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm of the social lives of things, or the “thing-in-motion”, provides an apropos theoretical framework: “For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” The cultural biography of the object, then, reveals a broad economy of utility that may encompass varied forms of use. The artist’s Xuanlong series is premised on objects and matter in motion, things that acquire new significance in purposive juxtapositions with other things; his works inflect the socio-cultural biographies of these objects, reconfiguring their semantic registers as much as their material ones. This piece includes two diminutive bronze dragon sculptures affixed to an U-shaped length of stainless steel pipe; the sculptures were originally part of a Balinese incense burner.

TABLET: New Paintings by Filippo Sciascia

TABLET: New Paintings by Filippo Sciascia

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Filippo Sciascia